They rose countless out of the soil ahead. The individual specimens looked like the spiky little cactus trees popular in a Texas florist’s souvenir pots, except that these were three to four feet tall and the crisscrossing, rod-shaped branches were fibrous. They wove themselves closely into dense clumps, but they yielded readily to the pressure of wading against them.
“Looks like a big weed patch,” McDonald said.
“Funny-looking weeds,” Wertz said. “They look more like giant crystal lattice.”
McDonald said, “We’d better get going. We’ve got to be back by 1300. Colonel Cragg meant that. It’s be back or else. I’ll get a fix.”
They were sixty yards to the right of the point of Dr. Pembroke’s entry. The vegetation zone met the red plain so sharply that its edge might have been laid off with a giant ruler.
McDonald said, “Dr. Pembroke couldn’t pull his carts through this stuff. It’s too thick. I don’t see why we haven’t spotted them. With these lights. We can see a hundred yards.”
“Maybe he pulled them in a little way,” Wertz said.
“Then they’d be hard to find when he came out, if he didn’t backtrack his trail exactly.”
They paced off the sixty yards, but no carts appeared. They penetrated the lichen zone ten yards and turned to look. A broad swath of depressed plants lay behind them.
“Four men couldn’t come through without leaving a sign,” Wertz said. “Even if it’s elastic enough to spring back, they’d be bound to break a lot of it. I say they didn’t come in here.”
“Okay,” Dane said, “but we’re exactly on Dr. Pembroke’s course, as nearly as instruments can tell. We could be off several feet, though, and we wouldn’t see a few broken plants. Let’s go on in at 39 degrees. Maybe we’ll pick up their trail.”
The spacecraft beacon was bright and friendly. A link with air and warmth and Earth. They lined up a bearing on it and ranged out in a front. Dane took the point. The others flanked him at fifty feet. With their lights playing about them, they pushed ahead into the lichens.
The ground lay flat, but the matted plants cut the advance to a crawl. It didn’t help much to go around the denser clumps or zigzag for the small bare places that they encountered every few yards, as in open jungle.
“I don’t see how the spark fires come from this kind of stuff,” McDonald said.
Dane shook off the feeling of isolation. He was glad for someone to say something. “In the first place that’s only the most apparent explanation,” he told him. “That’s just the one you would think of first, plus the fact that you don’t see them anywhere except above the lichens. It’s just a good guess that somehow the sunlight causes them to generate and store up static electricity until it discharges under pressure, like sheet lightning on Earth. After dark the charges don’t build up any more, so they exhaust themselves. In a couple of hours the display is over.”
“Personally I’m thinking about the radiation,” Wertz said. “That’s not static electricity. Not by a long shot. If it builds up high by noon tomorrow, the insulation in these suits won’t do us much good.”
Dane said, “Again we’re only speculating. We don’t know for sure that it’s harmful. Or what exposure to it would be lethal.”
“Spivak thinks it’s dangerous. He’s the radiophysicist.”
“After all we’ve had only three days’ experience with it,” Dane reminded him. “Just because it increased today over yesterday doesn’t inevitably mean it’s going to increase again tomorrow.”
“We hope!” Wertz said.
Noise burst out like a crash of splintering timber. Dane stabbed out with his light, plunging the beam crazily into the dark night. Then he realized that it was his own earphones blasting.
He turned down the volume sharply. McDonald was over-loading the microphone. Yelling for them to come.
He heard Wertz’s excited “What-the-hell?” He swung around and splashed light over McDonald. The lieutenant stood motionless, the plants deep around his suited figure.
“What’s the trouble?” Dane snapped into the transmitter.
“Here!”
Wertz came up rapidly.
It was prone in its bed of lichens. At first it might have been painted green. Dane bent closer and saw that the pressure suit was covered with a sprouting of tiny lichen spears, like a week’s growth of mossy beard.
“Who is it?” Wertz demanded.
Fighting his clumsy armor, Dane knelt and turned it over on its back. The green scum blanked the transparent helmet. He scraped at it with the blade of his belt knife until the color came reluctantly away, leaving a frost on the glassite.
Dane put his light close to the patch he had scraped. “It’s Lieutenant Houck!”
McDonald’s voice was flat. “Is he dead?”
Dane thought, No, just taking a nap. A hundred million miles from his wife’s bed. “I can’t tell,” he said. “His oxygen and his air conditioner should still be good.”
Wertz got down awkwardly on one knee. “What’s he doing here?”
“Look!” Dane felt the shock of revelation physically. He ran the light over the suit and poked the knife blade at the flexible corset joints. The whole side of the shell crumbled away, like acid-robbed metal in a metallurgical test.
“Exploded! Frozen like a mackerel!” Wertz gasped.
They got up and backed away, looking at their suits and the plant things all around them.
“They ate right through it, didn’t they?” McDonald croaked. “They ate right through it!”
“Froze him quick. But he was damn well exploded already,” Dane said.
“This stuff comes to full life under sunlight!” Wertz choked up.
Wertz was scared. Well, who wasn’t? “That’s what they say,” Dane told him, ignoring the fact that the chemist should know better than he. “The theory is that it carries on photosynthesis in the daytime and stores enough oxygen for the night.” Powerful body, powerful mind, not much guts, he thought, again revising his estimate of the man. Yet he had volunteered to come along. “After sunset they are supposed to become dormant in the cold. Eighty to ninety degrees below. Fahrenheit, that is, too. With practically no oxygen in the atmosphere, there isn’t any other theory for the survival of the plants overnight. In a latent state they wouldn’t need any more than the little oxygen that they could store up in the daytime.”
Wertz said, “We know all that. What we’ve got to think about is that if they’re dangerous at all, they’re most dangerous in the daytime. Right now it’s obvious that we haven’t got a chance unless we get out of here tonight. It’s plain what happened to Pembroke.”
“Likely you’re right about the danger in the daytime.” Dane agreed. “But we’ve got a lot of time even after sunrise. It takes them several hours to thaw out.”
Wertz said, “They must exude an acid. Like some of the Earth lichens. So you wade through them, you don’t go very far.”
“Even so, even after they wake up and get going, it would take it a while to eat through our suits.”
“You hope!” Wertz said impatiently.
“Let’s go,” Dane said. “I don’t like it any better than you do. We can’t do anything for Houck, but we’ve got to find the others. Even if they’re dead too, we’ve got to be sure. You can go on back now if you want to.”
“Who said anything about going back now?” Wertz growled. “Whoinhell you think you are anyway!” he flared up. “You follow your own nose. I’ll carry my end of this little detail.”
“I’ve got to report about Lieutenant Houck to Colonel Cragg,” Lieutenant McDonald said.
“You mean just in case?” Wertz asked him.